OVERVIEW

Our 2013 Fall Convergence focuses on Creative Practice and Creative Process. We ask our featured writers and our attendees: What is Your Creative Practice? What is Your Creative Process? And we place attention on new and sustained work in progress.

Creative practice draws attention to the set of habits and directions writers and artists bring to their creative work. As writers engage in creative endeavor, they employ any of a number of conscious and unconscious commitments as to what should constitute their work. On the one hand, practice might be seen simply as what writers do or perform repeatedly to get better at it. On the other hand, practice may involve a firm set of aesthetic, political and / or ethical commitments that incline the writer to focus on specific projects and approaches to these projects. Often literary manifestoes or declamatory poetics—practice as praxis—insist on certain forms of practice as irreproachable and necessary.

Creative process, likewise, can be two pronged. Most generally, writing process is concerned with how writers engage in their work over time, as a temporal process. A writer might speak of their process in writing a specific work or of their process overall in creating an opus. Creative process places attention on: How do writers get involved, or get creative, in making their work? How do they initiate and stay attentive to their work? How do they inculcate a strong sense of motivation or inspiration? Creative process also has its own set of political templates. For some writers, work that is not created through an involved creative process falls short of creativity itself. In other words, if the writer was not directly involved in what he or she is doing, as a thinking, emotional, and sentient being, then such person might merely be a writing mechanic, not a creative agent.

All writers, in order to write at all, have a creative practice and a creative process. And for most writers, there is considerable overlap between these, although not all writers are as interested in inquiring into their practice and / or process as others. One’s practice and process can be collectively or personally defined; these can be dictated by mainstream publishing expectations or encouraged by less dominant venues and forces—organized groups of writers, specific movements, small press and electronic publishing.

Through the focus on Creative Practice and Creative Process, the Fall Convergence places attention on two questions defining for the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics:

How is creative writing an ethical, political, and / or aesthetic endeavor?

What forms might creative writing take in interconnected, transnational societies—societies that are marked by increasingly by diversity as well as homogeneity?

All conference events are free and open to the public, with the exception the program dinner on Saturday eveing. Please see the schedule below for more details, and get in touch with iasgraduate@uwb.edu if you have questions.

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